Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Writing in The Hill, Brenton Smith of FixSSNow.Org outlines Sen. Bernie Sanders’ plan to reform Social Security, a plan that both raises benefits for people who haven’t paid for them and requires people to pay for benefits they will not receive.

Sanders’s paradigm enables politics to replace contribution as the determinate of benefits. Politics could increase the benefits of current ‘low-income seniors’ completely independent of what someone had contributed in the past. It could equally well reduce the benefits of future workers as Sanders currently proposes.

1 comment:

This is one of the top articles I have read that clearly puts into words how the problem has been dealt with in the past and potentially in the future.

Solvent for 50 years means that a typical 35 year-old will enter retirement in the exact same position as the new retiree does today. At full retirement, today’s younger worker will expect to outlive scheduled benefits, unless politicians can sell the greatest accomplishment of government to a new set of younger workers who expect to lose money on the system.

In other words, 50 years of solvency is the cost to make the problem of Boomers an even larger problem for their children. 75 years of solvency is the cost to make the problem of voters a larger problem for non-voters. Solvency is the definition of kicking the can, where we are only haggling about how far the can is kicked.

About me

I am a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, where my work focuses on Social Security policy. Previously I held several positions within the Social Security Administration, including Deputy Commissioner for Policy and principal Deputy Commissioner. Prior to that I was a Social Security Analyst at the Cato Institute. In 2005 I worked on Social Security reform at the White House National Economic Council, and in 2001 I was on the staff of the President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security. My Bachelor's degree is from the Queen's University of Belfast, Northern Ireland. I have Master's degrees from Cambridge University and the University of London and a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science. I can be contacted at andrew.biggs @ aei.org.